It's true that there's always a procedure in place for bypassing the official policy as needed. However, it often comes down to a question of whether its faste

It's true that there's always a procedure in place for bypassing the official policy as needed. However, it often comes down to a question of whether its faster to follow this procedure or to simply undermine the security. I've repeatedly seen people solve the problem of handling unsigned certificates by simply moving back to pure HTTP. This is a great security hole than the unsigned certs ever were, but it's perfectly valid with their security policy. I can actually take your key analogy into true story territory. I worked at an office where a manager had to be gone for a month. He had the only key and the policy to get a new key wouldn't get one to us for weeks. It was also against policy for him to give the key to someone else while he was gone. The solution was to simply leave all the doors unlocked while he was gone. I understand the need for security. I understand that security is your job and that you don't want to compromise for mediocre security. However, when you won't compromise, we don't get great security. We get no security.